dovecot - May 2008 - Manual thread breaking from Thunderbird

Hello

I'm looking for a way to manually break threads apart when independent 
threads are mixed up, mostly by users which aren't aware that they 
should not be replying to existing threads when starting a new one.

Since Thunderbird afaik does the threading itself, it would require a 
solution that actually changes the In-Reply-To header (and maybe also 
that other (non-standard?) header which is being sent by the M$ 
clients). For me modifying the actual emails on disk would be fine, i.e. 
renaming the In-Reply-To header to Old-In-Reply-To and such. (I'd 
actually *prefer* a solution that modifies the server side store, as 
opposed to one which keeps that info on the client side only like mutt 
seems to be doing.)

Is there a way to do this already? Seems like a task for a dovecot 
plugin--or for the xexec plugin and an external perl script or some such?

For triggering the renaming, a hacky solution could be to misuse labels 
(e.g. marking a message starred and "Later" and "Important"
at the same
time would trigger the modification and remove the labels).

When implementing such a thing: maybe also offer a way to modify 
subjects (for those cases where people are using short meaningless and 
recurring subjects--to both help breaking up the ensuing threading as 
well as giving them a useful replacement), maybe as an IMAP extension or 
such (to be used by Thunderbird plugins (?), or by web apps).

(I can code in C and Perl, but don't generally have much time.)

Christian.

Christian Jaeger wrote:
>  I'm looking for a way to manually break threads apart when independent
> threads are mixed up, mostly by users which aren't aware that they
should
> not be replying to existing threads when starting a new one.
Sounds like a great idea!

I'm curious though, how do convince your Thunderbird and Dovecot to
work like Gmail and keep everything threaded in the same folder in the
first place?

(Assuming that you do this and apply labels to tell things apart..)